The Idea of Forever
by Lady Bracknell
Summary: Bill and Fleur's wedding proves an unlikely setting for Remus' doubts and reservations to finally fall away. Coda to Over The Moon, but can be read alone.


**Disclaimer: If I was JKR, I'd be ducking and covering about now, not posting fic. Ergo, anything you recognise isn't mine.**

** A/N: Written for the Metamorfic Moon Last Chance Showdown. Can be read alone, but this is the coda to Over The Moon, if you've been reading that. This is my pet theory for R/T in DH, so I thought I'd better write it before JKR shoots my plot bunny...  
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* * *

"Marry me," he says, out of nowhere, and she looks up at him, a confused smile on her lips because he can't possibly have said what she thinks he just has. 

He meets her eye, and says it again, and this time, a smile tugs at his lips and he gives in to it, and she knows she hasn't misheard.

They stop dancing, and behind them, the wedding carries on – the band play, people chat, dance, laugh – but they're separate, isolated somehow, and all she sees is him.

She presses her lips together, and thinks about the words, and she loves that he's said them and said them like that, because however she looks at it, it isn't a question. It's the first time in a long time that he hasn't talked of them with reservations on his lips and doubt in his eyes; he's certain of her now, she thinks, as certain as she always was of him, and it feels wonderful.

"Ok," she says, and pulls him closer, nestles into his chest, grinning as his arms relax around her.

"Ok?" he says, and his voice is amused, and surprised, and a little bit indignant.

"Hmm."

"Just _ok_?" he says, lifting her, _peeling_ her away from him and gently holding her shoulders, keeping her from resuming her place on his chest. He raises an eyebrow. "That's all I get?"

She sniggers a little at the look on his face. It's partly amusement that she'd have the audacity, partly a huge smile just waiting to break free.

"Hmm," she says. "If you want more than that by way of reply, I think you have to say slightly more in the first place."

He raises his eyebrow higher still, as if he's about to protest, but then he just gives in to his grin, and pulls her back to him. "Fair enough," he says.

For a moment, they just sway on the spot with their arms around each other, and then she tilts her face up at the same instant he looks down, and he kisses her.

Somewhere in the background, the wedding goes on. People chat, and dance, and laugh, and the band play….

But she barely knows they're there, because Remus has asked her, without asking, to marry him, and she's said ok.

She doesn't care that she's oblivious to everything but him; she wants to savour every detail, every millisecond of their kiss, because it's making her very soul tingle.

* * *

The wind whips her cloak up around her ears, and she laughs, because it's supposed to be July, but it's freezing. 

He's wearing a suit – he said one of them, at least, should dress up for the occasion, and as she fights with her cloak, he regards her outfit with amused disdain.

He'd worn largely the same expression earlier that afternoon when she'd come out of the bedroom to show him what she'd chosen to wear. She'd raised an eyebrow at him, then, and said, in response to his unuttered question, "What? This is my third best Weird Sisters T shirt."

He'd asked why he didn't warrant the first or second best, and she'd rolled her eyes and told him that the first best had a slogan on it that was a bit inappropriate for a wedding, even her own, and that the second was in the wash because she'd spilt marmalade on it while he was in the shower.

She catches her cloak and forces it down, and thinks that she likes it like this, him in his suit and her in her third favourite T shirt. She likes that they'll get married looking like them, not some version of them they've never seen before and will never see again – and so before he can make some crack about her cloak trying to take off, or remind her that he'd said it might be windy and she'd be better off with the shorter one, she takes his hand, and tells him there'll be time to mock her sartorial choices later, but they'd better get going, because it's impolite to be late for your own wedding.

They've picked a small place on the outskirts of some Scottish village neither of them can pronounce the name of with any real confidence, and when they get there, it's prettier than it looked in the pictures, and they both smile.

He'd worried, initially, that she didn't really want to do things like this, was just agreeing so he wouldn't be embarrassed about not being able to afford his half of the traditional trappings –

But she'd told him that she didn't need a fancy dress, a bouquet she could barely lift and a huge ring on her finger, because none of that was important, and all a wedding really needed was a bride and groom. She liked the idea of just the two of them and their vows, had told him that it would be more personal and romantic that way, and since then, he hadn't mentioned it. Besides anything else, she was fairly sure her dad had spent what he'd saved for a wedding on a West Ham season ticket the day she signed up to be an Auror….

They make their way down the tiny hill, and she thinks the mischievous schoolboy in Remus has loved all this, making plans, keeping them secret. She remembers the night he came home and said he'd found the perfect place, that he didn't want to presume, but they'd said if they came late in the day, they'd fit them in. When she'd said yes, agreed that it sounded perfect –

Well, she wouldn't have missed the look on his face for anything.

He's wearing the same look now as he watches her take in the white-washed building and the copse of pine trees it's settled against – it used to be a blacksmith's, and above the door is a very large horseshoe for luck. It's lovely, and her breath catches a little in her chest.

Before they go in, he _Conjures_ a flower for her – just the one – and it's a sunflower, because once, she told him they were her favourites. It looks a bit ridiculous, probably, she thinks, clashes with her T shirt _and_ her hair, and it prickles her fingers as she holds it, but she clutches it anyway.

They say their vows – he promises to be hers forever, and when she says it back she wonders if she's ever meant anything more.

Outside, they kiss for what feels like a little taste of forever, and even the wind has let up for a moment, and the sun has come out.

* * *

He's booked them a room at a pub – it has roses round the door that are a little battered by the wind, but clinging on, and for a second, she thinks what a lovely place this'll be to come back to when she's forty, sixty, eighty, and they've seen twenty, forty, sixty years together. He tells her that here, they sell fourteen different kinds of real ale and that the food is supposed to be excellent, and when the man at the bar asks for their names and Remus says, "Mr and Mrs Lupin," he can't resist meeting her eye and grinning.

They go upstairs and dump their things. He changes out of his suit, and she drops her cloak on the chair and her flower into a vase, and, tempting as rumpling the neatly folded-down duvet is, they go back downstairs for dinner because neither of them have eaten since breakfast.

The food really is excellent, and they talk and laugh and can't take their eyes off each other, and it feels more like their first night out together than the culmination of everything so far, everything they've been through.

When she looks at him across the table, flickering light from the candle illuminating his face, his smile, she can't quite believe how happy she makes him, how much he loves her. It still seems impossible that she gets that for a reward, when all she does to earn it is something that comes as naturally as breathing.

After dinner, they slip back upstairs. They've talked so long it's grown dark around them, so she lights her wand and shines their way down the corridor.

As soon as the door to the room closes behind them, he takes her in his arms, and in the light from her wand, his face looks handsome, and his eyes shine, and she can tell that he's grinning again, without even looking at his lips.

She lifts herself up on her toes a little, tilts up her face, and he kisses her softly, but with intent, too, and her soul doesn't just tingle; this time, it sings.

She winds her hands around his neck, just avoiding poking him in the back of the head with her wand – which reminds her that she still has it, and so she mutters, "_Nox_," between kisses, and plunges them into darkness.

He eases her closer, flush against his body, and she closes her eyes and savours. After a moment, his fingers are on her hips and they're stumbling towards the bed –

She wonders if things will feel different, now.

Nothing's really changed on the signing of a slip of paper, she thinks, but everything has, too, because they've promised forever, and she knows they both meant it. She smiles against his skin as he shifts and covers her body with his, slides her fingers over his shoulders and into his hair.

There wasn't a wedding today, she thinks. There wasn't a band, or people to chat and dance and laugh – no dress, only one flower and no diamond on her finger – but that's what made it wonderful.

After everything, she thinks, all they needed was them, and the idea of forever.

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** A/N: Cheers for reading. Reviewers get to elope with a Harry Potter character of their choice ;).**


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